Eric Church: Go Big Bird or Go Home

The singer is all for a killer costume, no matter the cost – both literally and figuratively speaking.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images For EB Media PR

During his first year of college, the North Carolina native found himself headed to a Halloween festival in Chapel Hill with several buddies. Sounds like a good plan, right? Sure – except for one teeny hiccup. Church didn’t have a costume. Neither did his friends. And for this festival, you kinda had to have a costume.

It was Halloween and sadly, everything was sold out. Desperate, the group drove all over town until they finally struck gold at a local “hole-in-the-wall” place, complete with the full set of Sesame Street costumes. We’re talking the real ones, y’all, with feathers and fur.

“We were Elmo, Cookie Monster, and I was Big Bird – and the Big Bird was the actual Big Bird,” Church recently told his record label in a chat.

Standing 7-foot-4, with straps keeping the head of the costume properly atop the body, Church strutted down a hoppin’ (beer pun intended) Franklin Street with serious swagger – until the straps broke and the big, bird head began to pivot.

Tell me you all have this hilarious mental picture crystal clear in your heads.

“I would be walking one way and the head would be facing the other, and it just became this funny … I didn’t know the head was on backwards. I had no idea. I see out of the body, so I’m just kinda walking around and people were talking to my a**-end,” he recalled with a laugh.

And people loved it.

“The whole time people would come up and start talking and go, ‘Hey, turn around.’ And I’d turn around, and they’d go, ‘No turn around.’ It was a mess,” he said.